For example, the lonely interior landscape Bishop creates in “Crusoe in England”-a symbolic self-portrait without vanity-is not heroic or wistful. Her poetry had a recklessly candid darkness I loved. Maybe those other poets were simply more appealing for a child of Sylvia Pinsky, with her rude jokes about Ruthie Edelstein’s ass filling up a picture window-not a Lowell image.Īnother poet I valued more than Lowell was Elizabeth Bishop. Lowell’s mania felt more somber and grand. The manic moods of Dugan, Ginsberg and Moore in their different ways included a sense of the ridiculous. His (possibly legendary) ancestor Old Billy Blue Balls was wounded so he had “two ass-holes.” Dugan has him say, “The North won the Civil War / without much help from me / although I wear a proof / of the war’s obscenity” (“Fabrication of Ancestors.”). The oblique collision Moore creates between her father’s social place and the cat’s prey has a quality I admire in the work of Alan Dugan, whose Poems and Poems 2 came out around the same time as Life Studies. A book I didn’t like, and for years ignored, had opened new possibilities for people I admired. Life Studies had been transforming for them. For my impressive new friends Frank Bidart, Gail Mazur and Lloyd Schwartz, Lowell was the great living model of a poet.
Leland and Jane Stanford had founded the university on their ranch, in 1891, and the school’s affectionate nickname for itself was “the Farm.” In Palo Alto, too, as in the quite different literary and urban terrain of Rutgers, Robert Lowell’s poetry was not held in the first rank of importance.īut five or six years later, in 1970, I took a job teaching at Wellesley College, not far from Boston and Cambridge, where I met poets who considered Life Studies a major work of art. Surrounding the sleepy Palo Alto of those days, an actual village, the future Silicon Valley was still a place of horse ranches and apricot orchards. I said aloud to Lowell’s book, “Yeah, I had a grandfather, too.” Like my fellow would-be urban Beatniks at Rutgers, I preferred the manners of Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”-the poet reading the Hebrew prayer for the dead while listening to Ray Charles and walking the streets of Greenwich Village.Ī year later, when I arrived as a graduate student at Stanford, I entered a culture more bucolic than what I had known at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey-the home state of Ginsberg, with urban New Brunswick about an hour from those Village streets. In a shallow way, my dislike was a matter of social class. It won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960. Life Studies is Robert Lowell’s best-known and most influential book.
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